Users gain ability to strictly monitor who can access content they store on the social network

By Heather Havenstein

March 19, 2008 (Computerworld) After enduring withering criticism late last year for the lack of adequate privacy controls in its Beacon advertising system, Facebook Inc. today garnered positive reviews for new controls that let users more strictly monitor who can access the content they create on the site.

The privacy controls launched Wednesday let users limit access to information like photo albums or contact information to specific Facebook friends or friends lists, the company said. Facebook had rolled out the friends list feature in December as a way to help users communicate with groups of friends on the network.

Nick O’Neill, a blogger on All Facebook, noted that the new features

provide users with more granular privacy by specifying various settings for each friend list. “This means that, in theory, all of my professional contacts will no longer be able to access my photos, and I can start posting those photos of my crazy times in college,” he added.

“These new settings have theoretically transformed Facebook, making it possible to manage all of my contacts from one site,” O’Neill wrote.

The All Facebook blogger also noted that the social networking firm today also launched a new option that allows users to opt-out of personalized SocialAds that integrate into photos a notice telling his or her friends about recent purchases made at various online retailers.

“If you hadn’t noticed already, once in a while your friends’ photos have been showing up on ads promoting applications and fan pages,” O’Neill said. “Many were turned off by those ads complaining that making money off of our profiles is crossing the line. This is a significant step by Facebook, highlighting that Facebook has granted a higher priority to user privacy over monetization. This is an encouraging step and greatly welcomed, considering there wasn’t much controversy over the ads as they existed.”

Josh Catone, a blogger on ReadWriteWeb, said that when the friends list feature was rolled out in December, he called it a necessary first step in attracting the business networking crowd to Facebook. However, he also noted that the feature “had no teeth” because of a lack of privacy controls. That has changed because the new features give users the option of showing private information to only specific friends or “friends of friends,” which is similar to features in the more business-oriented LinkedIn professional networking site, Catone added.

“While going after the business networking crowd has never been an objective expressed overtly by the company, it does make sense,” he said. “As Facebook’s core early audience — college students — grows up, they’ll need a more secure environment to network with colleagues and friends. Facebook is slowly positioning itself to be a place where both casual and business networking can take place at the same time, which means that rather than maintaining two accounts — one at Facebook and one at LinkedIn or Xing — users could stay at Facebook and use the tools they grew accustomed to in college.”

Not all industry observers were pleased with the changes. Jeffrey Chester, founder and executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy — one of the strongest critics of Beacon’s initial lack of privacy controls — noted that Facebook still has to ensure that its members are candidly informed about any personal data shared with advertisers and marketers.

“Its incremental improvements — all due to the increasing scrutiny in the EU and U.S. and from privacy advocates — are occurring at a snail’s pace,” he said. “Facebook’s senior managers still have not come to terms with the need for them to ensure transparency and full user control.”

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By Emil Protalinski 

Earlier this month, Microsoft blog sites erupted with the news that Bill Gates had cancelled his Facebook account after The Sun ran a story saying that Gates made the move because he was “getting more than 8,000 friend requests a DAY.” Speculation ranging from Gates having a secret profile to someone else controlling his account quickly began to surface. Despite many rumors of Microsoft buying Facebook in September of last year, all that ended up happening was a $240 million advertising agreement. It would appear that Gates has realized he has no interest in Facebook, beyond corporate deals, simply because he’s a businessman. 

And what’s the Facebook equivalent for businessmen? LinkedIn. Significantly less popular than Facebook (according to Alexa, it ranks 215 on the web as opposed to a rank of 7), it is oriented around expanding business contacts and building an electronic résumé. News.com first broke the story that Gates had moved to LinkedIn, saying that he would use the service to ask the site’s 19 million members “how technology can be better utilized for charitable causes.” 

The social networking site was down on Thursday because of “upgrades to improve our service.”Supposedly, a “notable advertising announcement” is also on its way. Could Gates’ move have been part of an advertising deal with LinkedIn? Considering Gates is the number one searched person on the site, and since Google already has MySpace under its thumb, I would say such a move is only a matter of time.

Chairman and cofounder of the largest software company in the world, Gates is always being watched very closely by the tech industry, even more so I would say since he decided to give up his day-to-day duties at Microsoft, by July 2008. After his last CES keynote and his last day, his plans and decisions seem to be less out in the open, but this only makes them more of a big deal. As demonstrated just over a week ago, it will be a long while before we see the last of Gates, especially when it comes to Microsoft.

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By Peter Nisbet (c) 2008  

If you know how to use Squidoo to achieve improved search engine rank of your web pages, then you have a tool at your disposal that can be just as powerful as using traditional search engine optimization, if not more so.

One important facet of your Squidoo lens is that it could be listed on Google, or any of the other search engines, for your major keywords, and you should not lose sight of any promotional techniques that provide you with free exposure on search engines. If you Blink your Squidoo lens, you can win every way. Not just with Blinklist, but you can have it listed on just about every social networking site you can think of, Technorati and Deli.cio.us included. Also Furl, Craigslist, Stumbleupon and any of the many others out there.

For those not totally aware of what Squidoo is, I don’t intend to go into the ethos of the site right here, other than to state that it can be used as a promotional tool as well as a being a virtual website. Your lens can also be given a Google PageRank. You can use your Squidoo lens in place of a minisite in order to promote yourself and your product, and improve your search engine listing. You can use it as a showcase for your products, your blogs or even your websites, and draw traffic to it and hence to those other online ventures you are involved in.

In order to use Squidoo as a promotional tool for your main website you have to know a lot about the topic of your site. It is not a tool to use to sell an affiliate product, for example, unless you are an authority on that product. However, if you have written a book on a certain aspect of SEO, and want to advertise it, then Squidoo is ideal for that. The reason is that you can give in order to earn. Hence, Squidoo is great for me, because I can provide visitors to my lens with useful information on SEO, while at the same time advertising my SEO site that offers my product. I then get visitors and a link from Squidoo, both of which are great for my search engine rank, and also listing position.

It might be possible just to advertise the product directly, but I prefer to provide information. That allows your visitors to become confident that know what you are talking about, and are not just a ‘fly by night’ that is trying to sell a product that you know nothing about. The objective of Squidoo is to provide useful information on topics to others interested in that topic. If they go to Squidoo and click on a category, they should be able to find all the info they are looking for.

They don’t want outright adverts, but if they find that you are providing good information, then they might want to visit your website. You give them the link to do so, and then they get more information. Part of that might be the offer to purchase your product that will possibly solve their problem. However, neither you nor they know that it will, so you provide them with a guarantee that if it doesn’t work for them, they get their money back. You have used Squidoo to persuade them that you know what you are talking about, that led them to your site and more information, and then to your product. They buy it, try it, and if it works fine. If not, they get refunded. In my book that is the proper way to conduct business, and you can use Squidoo to help you with that.

You can also optimize your lens for maximum search engine listing position, since your Squidoo lens should be based upon a single keyword or keyphrase to enable you to get a good listing. You can SEO a lens just as you can do a web page, and with the same effect. Free organic traffic from your listing position.

To achieve all that, sign up for Squidoo, follow their instructions and get your first lens up and running, and then use it to promote your regular website and improve its ranking. You must also make sure that your customers have an out if it doesn’t work for them. Squidoo provide lots of help in designing your first lens, but if you already have website then you should find it easy. Optimize your lens for the search engines and you are all set.

By combining your web page, lens and blog optimization, and cross-promoting each in an intelligent way, it is difficult to see how you could fail to get high search engine listings and improved search engine rank using Squidoo and SEO.

About The Author
If you need more information on how to use Squidoo for improved search engine rank, here is a lens that does what I am suggesting you do. Check it out, and then sign up for Squidoo yourself from the same page. Copy what I do and you can hardly fail. The free info on the page is important, especially Improved Search Engine Rank dot com and might be all that you are looking for.

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I surely did not see this coming anytime soon but Facebook just released their JavaScript client library than enables developers to extend their applications to their own websites. Rather than building your applications strictly within Facebook you can now extend the full functionality of the platform to your own website and leverage Facebook as the tool for managing members and their relationships. Somehow nobody has seemed to take note of this significant step.

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

The second difference is that Facebook has now implemented the ability to leverage cookies to access a user’s data even when they are not at your application. Since this just launched last night, I have yet to see any applications (or websites) take advantage of this new feature. This is a huge step in Facebook extending their platform beyond the Facebook.com domain and letting people leverage the power of the “social graph” (I hate to use that phrase in this context but oh well).

Update
Debate has surfaced as to whether or not new functionality is being offered. In essence this is just the client facing version of what you could already accomplish via an iFrame on the platform. I would argue that what’s significant here is that Facebook has publicly released something that is intended to extend the platform to the outside. See Dan Farber’s post for more. The public is now aware of the possibilities to leverage Facebook outside of the main site and that is big news.

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By Kalena Jordan (c) 2008

Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine marketing refers to a specific type of advertising where you pay a search engine every time a potential customer clicks on your ad. These ads appear on search engine results pages and sometimes on sites within a search engine’s network of partners.

How do Pay Per Click Ads Work?

If you look at a search engine results page (SERP) carefully, you can generally distinguish between search results that are regular algorithmic or “organic” search listings and PPC search results which are actually paid advertisements. The latter are generally listed under the headings “sponsored results” or “featured listings” and consist of specially designed text, image or video ads that are triggered to display when your target keywords are used in a search query. The PPC ads generally appear on the right hand side and/or at the top of the search results pages.

To appear in the PPC results, advertisers sign up for the PPC program of their choice and create short text ads, image ads or videos describing the product or service available on their site in a way that will best entice searchers to visit it. During the program setup, an advertiser will decide which trigger keywords/phrases they wish to bid on and how much they are willing to pay when a visitor clicks on their ad. Generally, the higher the bid, the more likely their ad will show above their competitor’s.

The Origins of Pay Per Click Marketing

The PPC industry was pioneered by GoTo.com (later re-branded as Overture before it was purchased by Yahoo! in July 2003). Despite their enormous success, GoTo’s PPC model was met with a lot of skepticism in the industry following their IPO in 1999. Their eventual purchase by Yahoo put to rest any doubts that pay per click advertising was here to stay.

In October 2000, Google which was eventually to become the world’s most popular search engine, launched their own keywords advertising model (Google AdWords), blending algorithmic search results with pay per impression ads.

In 2002, in an attempt to compete more successfully with Overture, Google expanded AdWords to include the pay per click pricing model we are familiar with today. This model proved both more popular and more successful and eventually replaced the pay-per-impression model as the default system.

By 2002, GoTo (by then rebranded as Overture), had distribution deals with an impressive range of search engines including Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, InfoSpace and a number of meta search engines including MetaCrawler and Ixquick. Overture’s powerful distribution network guaranteed advertisers placement of their ads in front of a LOT of eyeballs and it became clear that many were willing to pay big bucks for the privilege. Other major search engines also formed successful distribution partnerships with PPC providers during this time, noticeably AOL, AskJeeves and MSN with Google AdWords. The pay per click industry had officially arrived.

Scores of PPC search engines began to spring up following Overture’s lead, however the PPC industry continued to be dominated by the two big PPC players, Overture and Google AdWords, while Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Google fought it out for dominance in the general search market.

In July 2003, in a move that shocked the industry, Yahoo! purchased Overture to enable them to better compete with market leader Google. In April 2005 they rebranded the PPC engine as Yahoo! Search Marketing and in 2006 they launched a revamped version of the service, code-named Panama.

Meanwhile, in October 2005, Microsoft quietly launched their own PPC service called MSN adCenter. An official launch in the US, together with a name change to Microsoft AdCenter occurred in May 2006. In May 2007, Microsoft revamped AdCenter with new features and rolled it out to advertisers worldwide.

Currently, Yahoo and Google continue to dominate the PPC landscape, although Microsoft AdCenter is beginning to make an impact. Second tier PPC engines such as MIVA (formerly Espotting and FindWhat) and Kanoodle are fast catching up to the majors.

There are now hundreds of PPC search engines worldwide, servicing global, regional and niche markets, but only a few that have achieved a significant market share of advertising revenue. A summary of the majors are listed below.

Yahoo! Sponsored Search

Yahoo! Sponsored Search is the current name for what was originally called Overture Precision Match. Yahoo! Sponsored Search prominently displays your site in search results on some of the top U.S. search properties that Yahoo! partners with. With Sponsored Search, you set the price you’re willing to pay for each customer who clicks on your listing.

Your ads appear at the top, bottom or right hand side of Yahoo search results pages under the heading “Sponsor Results”. Your ads are triggered on search result pages when searchers enter the keyword combinations that you’ve bid on. Your ads can be targeted by language and country.

If you create a keyword campaign and you use the ContentMatch option, your bid also buys you top listings on Yahoo’s partner sites AltaVista, InfoSpace, eBay, CitySearch, AllTheWeb and a range of news and content portals, such as USAToday, National Geographic, iVillage and NBC.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords gives web site owners the ability to promote their site when particular keyword or phrase searches are conducted at Google and partner sites. Your ads appear at the top or on the right side of search results pages in a “call out” box under the heading “Sponsored Links”. Your AdWords text, image or video ads appear on search result pages for the keywords you buy, and can be targeted by language and country.

With Google AdWords cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad, regardless of how many times it’s shown. Google adjusts your bids automatically to keep you ahead of your competition at the lowest possible price. Google AdWords results appear on Google search results pages, Google’s distribution partner sites, Google Gmail, and numerous content sites which are syndicated through the Google AdSense program.

Microsoft AdCenter

Microsoft adCenter is the newest kid on the Pay Per Click block. It includes the ability to target your ads to MSN Live Search users who match your target regional and demographic criteria.

Microsoft adCenter allows you to submit base bids for keywords or phrases you associate with your ads. This base bid is the maximum amount you are willing to pay if any Live Search user searches for one of your keywords and clicks your ad. You can also increase your bid in order to reach specific audience targets, which help increase the chance your ad will appear for a user who fits your buyer profile.

Targeted bidding in the Campaigns tab allows you to add amounts to your base bid to increase the possibility that your ad will show to searchers who fit your optimum buyer profile. You can use your bid amounts to influence your ad’s position in the Live Search results. In general, the more you bid, the higher the position your ad will have.

You can use Microsoft’s Intelligent Targeting feature to adjust your ads to match these variables:

• Geographical location
• Age and gender
• Day of the week
• Time of day (morning, afternoon, or night)

Interestingly, Microsoft pitches the ability to “build brand awareness” with their PPC program, due to the continued exposure of your ad and brand to a large market, regardless of whether that ad attracts clicks. This is an important feature of all major PPC programs but one that is rarely promoted by Google or Yahoo!

Perhaps brand-building is adCenter’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) because Microsoft claim to reach more potential eyeballs than their competitors: over 99 million people per month have access to their Live Search tool across MSN and Windows Live.

The Advantages of Pay Per Click Advertising

The growth of the search industry worldwide has created a huge market for paid search advertising and most search engines and directories now have some type of Pay For Performance or Pay Per Click (PPC) element to them.

Pay Per Click advertising:

• Enables webmasters to target geographical and niche markets more precisely via specific search queries.
• Enables webmasters to have their page URL displayed at the top of the search engine results pages without having to figure out complex search engine algorithms or pay an SEO expert to tweak their site for higher rankings.
• Enables webmasters to receive new traffic instantly.
• Enables a website or offline store to be found by search engine users even if no site exists or the site is not search engine compatible.
• Enables small businesses to operate globally and compete on an equal footing with much larger competitors.
• Enables instant sales and more measurable ROI via conversion tracking.
• Enables more precise visitor pathways to be plotted (e.g. by leading visitors to specific landing pages).
• Enables campaigns to be switched on and off on-demand to meet specific needs, search trends or specific events (e.g. Christmas sale)

About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

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Rumours are emerging that Nokia is in talks with Facebook to port the generally still-in-favour social network to its range of handsets. Sources have suggested that this could be as prominent a placement as the “YouTube” button is on Apple’s iPhone.

Facebook could benefit from Nokia’s advertising campaigns in retail outlets, and there’s even the possibility of Nokia “doing a Microsoft” and buying a stake in the young company.

If these rumours are based on even a smidgen of truth, then it marks another expansion of Nokia’s empire.

A senior Nokia executive is reported as saying, “There is talk of a partnership in the works… it’s safe to say we’re testing the waters and things still have to be worked out,” but, unsurprisingly, no official word from either company.

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The social networking website Facebook is to be questioned by the information watchdog about how it handles people’s personal data.

The move by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) comes after a user of the popular site complained he could not fully delete his profile after he had closed his account.

Currently, users who wish to remove their Facebook profiles are given the option to deactivate their account.

Once deactivated, the information becomes inaccessible but remains on Facebook’s computer database.

Those who wish to wipe out all information are advised to “log in and delete all profile content”, which involves manually removing everything from messages to pictures.

Facebook will then remove all the information from its server but only if a user has contacted the site and told it to do so.

Dave Evans, the senior data protection practice manager at the ICO, said he was worried about how difficult it was for Facebook users to take off personal information from the site.

“One of the things that we’re concerned about is that if the onus is entirely on the individual to delete their own data,” he told BBC Radio 4.

An individual who has deactivated their account might not find themselves motivated enough to delete information that’s about them, maybe on their wall or other people’s site.”

The ICO’s intervention comes only months after it warned millions of young Facebook users that they could jeopardise their careers by posting compromising personal details on social networking sites.

It cautioned against posting details of alcohol-fuelled nights out or sexual exploits because education institutions and employers were using them increasingly to vet potential students or employees.

Facebook insisted that its data protection policies were “in full compliance with UK date protection law”.

“We take the concerns of the Information Commissioner’s Office and our user’s privacy very seriously and are committed to working with the ICO to maintain a trusted environment for all Facebook users and ensure compliance with the UK law,” a spokesman said.

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By Scott Buresh (c) 2008

Nearly all search engines utilize spiders (which are also known by their original name, robots) to go out and scour the web looking for web pages. These search engine spiders then bring the data back to be indexed by the engine.

Since roughly 1996, individual meta commands have existed that can be used on individual web pages to modify how these search engine spiders behave. The most useful of these commands are fairly universal and respected by almost all search engines. What follows is a list of some of the more popular spider commands and instances in which you might want to use them.

This meta command is one of the most common ones used – and it is also the least necessary. It tells search engine spiders to come on in and put the page in their index. However, all search engines do this by default anyway. Basically, if you want to put it in there for fun, be my guest, but this command is not giving you any special treatment. All search engines are going to index your page, unless you specifically tell them otherwise.

The follow command is different from the index command. It basically requests that the search engine spiders follow the links that are on a particular page. Again, however, this piece of code is completely unnecessary because all search engines are going to follow the links on a page, unless otherwise directed.

The noindex command, the opposite of the index command, tells search engine spiders not to index the content of a page. It’s important to note however that search engine spiders will still follow the links on a page that uses only this command.

When not used for legitimate purposes, this tag can be dangerous because it can put you at risk for penalization by most, if not all search engines. This is because you can use a noindex tag to hide pages with multiple links that you don’t want visitors to see but that you do want all search engines to index.

There are however some legitimate uses for the noindex command. For example, if you have a dynamic site and you’ve created static pages to replace some of your dynamic pages, which can make them easier for search engine spiders to access, you could put a noindex tag on the dynamic version.

As Google mentions in its Webmaster Help Center:

“Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages.”

In cases like these, it is acceptable to use the “no index” command on the dynamic version of the page, so that your content will not be treated as duplicate. You are not tricking all search engines, you’re just redirecting them.

This tag tells search engine spiders that it’s OK to go ahead and index a page and list it but that they shouldn’t follow any of the links that are on the page. This can be useful if, for example, you had some partners that requested a link on your site that you felt obligated to give, but you wanted to hold onto as much Page Rank as possible. Now this is of course between you and your personal god, but you would be able to in effect have a partners page, add the nofollow attribute to the meta tags, and basically not pass on any of your Page Rank to any of the sites to which you are linking. The nofollow command in effect tells all search engines that this is the end of the line.

Obviously, noindex and nofollow are powerful tags – and in combination, they can make a page and the subsequent pages to which it links invisible to nearly all search engines. This combination command tells search engine spiders, “Do not read this page; do not follow any of the links on this page; do not include this page in your index.”

This command has its beneficial uses. For example, it can be placed on pages on a site that have duplicate content for legitimate reasons. A website might have both a page for the United States and a page for England that cover the same product with exactly the same content. However, nearly all search engines would see this as duplicate content and could devalue both pages. So placing this command on one of them means that search engine spiders will walk on by and you won’t be penalized.

Finally, almost all search engines today, including Google and Yahoo, provide a cached version of a site alongside its listing that provides a snapshot of what the page used to look like. The noarchive tag, therefore, is available to be used in circumstances where there is content on your website that is of a timely nature and therefore that you might not necessarily want search engine spiders to cache for people to have access to moving forward.

For example, a business might run a one-time special that has a ridiculously low price to drum up some business while things are slow. The business will want to be able to shut that sale down as soon as sales are back up to a solid level. However, it is conceivable that someone could click on the cached version of the business’s site, see the old deal that was out there, and insist on getting it for themselves. By using the noarchive tag, you are telling search engine spiders, in effect, “This page is subject to frequent changes, and I don’t want my visitors to have access to some of this content at a later time.”

Conclusion

The commands discussed above are just a few of the ones in existence, and new ones are being added frequently. While nearly all search engines support these commands, there are still some that don’t. The ones in this article, however, are fairly universally understood by search engine spiders, no matter from where they originate. As more universal commands are introduced, I will write about them in future articles.

About The Author
Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

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Americans are increasingly turning to the web for video, averaging 3.25 hours of video per person during the month of November, according to new data released by comScore today. Americans viewed nearly 9.5 billion online videos during the month and Google was the leading destination, with 3 billion videos viewed (31.3 percent share of all videos viewed), 2.9 billion of which occurred at YouTube.com (30.6 percent). Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 419 million videos viewed (4.4 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 328 million (3.5 percent) and Viacom Digital with 304 million (2.6 percent).

comScore also says that watching video on the web has become ubiquitous, with 138 million Americans, or roughly three in four U.S Internet users turning to the web for video.

Other notable findings from November 2007 include:

• 74.5 million people viewed 2.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (39 videos per viewer)
• 43.2 million people viewed 389 million videos on MySpace.com (9 videos per viewer)
• Online viewers watched an average of 3.25 hours (195 minutes) of online video during the month, representing a 29-percent gain from the 2.52 hours (151 minutes) watched in January 2007
• The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes
• The average online video viewer consumed 69 videos

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Google and its rival search engines may lose advertising pounds to sites such as Facebook and Bebo this year, as businesses shift their marketing focus to cash in on the social networking phenomena.

A new report, The Impact of Social Networking in the UK, claims that 2008 will see social networks improve their functionality, and in particular their ’search’ facilities.

Social networks know far more about their users than search engines and traditional portals. They could, for example, choose to show an advertisement only to men who live in Leeds, aged between 34 and 55, who enjoy Italian food.

This information could command much higher advertising rates than the straight forward ’sponsored links’ that are shown on Google.

“At the moment the search engines are pretty appalling on social networking sites”, said Robin Goad, director of research for Hitwise and co-author of the report

However, once social networks improve their search and navigation capabilities, information on companies will be easier to find, and this will boost targeted advertising capabilities.

Mr Goad said: “In the long-run it could threaten Google.”

Social networks have more than trebled their share of total UK internet visits in just under two years, according to the report written by market experts Experian/Hitwise.

As their number of users grow, the network effect kicks in and the average time users spend on the sites increases along with their contacts base.

Bebo for example, the UK’s second largest social networking site with 28pc of the market, tripled its market share of visits and increased its average session time from 6.2 minutes to 22.2 minutes between February 2005 and 2006.

More recently, social network messaging also eclipsed the use of emails - with social networking accounting for 5.21pc of all UK internet visits during November, compared to 4.92pc for email services, which include Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and GoogleMail among others.

Ringing further alarm bells for search engines, the report points out that social networks are an important source of traffic for other websites - particularly music, film and TV websites which were among the first to realise the advertising potential.

Social networks pushed 7.7pc of all internet traffic on to other websites, making the category the second most important source of traffic after search engines.

More than one in ten visits to entertainment and music websites came from social networks in October last year, with Bebo being the second highest source of traffic after Google.

Networking sites also have the ability to raise a company’s profile through micro-sites - for example through specific Facebook groups or pages.

Mr Goad pointed to the surge of interest in the Poppy campaign.

While the British Legion’s main homepage received less than 2pc of its traffic from Facebook during the campaign, the micro-site is set up specifically for the Poppy appeal (poppy.org.uk) received over one in ten of its visits from Facebook.

And 94pc of the visitors who came to the British Legion website from Poppy.org.uk during its busiest week, were new visitors - pulling in fresh traffic and a younger audience too, with 31pc of the visitors aged between 18-34.

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Social networking site Facebook has been judged to be the slowest and most inaccessible social networking site, according to a new report.

According to research conducted by website and application monitoring service WatchMouse, despite its popularity amongst users, the network took the longest to load up.

of 104 sites studied, 51 showed very slow loading times, achieving a so-called site performance index (SPI) of 1,000 or more.

In addition to Facebook, other social networks exhibiting slow performances included Twitter, last.fm and Friendster.

Commenting on the results, chief technical officer at WatchMouse Mark Pors stated: “It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance.

“It is surprising they still have such a big fan base when they serve their users so badly.”

The slowness of sites such as Facebook is surprising because they use Ajax technology, which is designed to increase speed and functionality, he added.

Ajax is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating web applications and is characterised by its ability to increase the responsiveness of web pages.

Summarising the findings, Mr Pors said: “For now, the sites will need to do a lot of work to remain popular and improve their performance.”

Not all the networks performed badly, however, with Faceparty achieving an SPI of 303, meaning the site can be accessed more quickly by users than some of its rivals.

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After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup

Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses - user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.

I spoke with the head of the DataPortability Group Chris Saad prior to this post (Chris is also the CEO of Faraday Media.) After about 24 hours of correspondence, the following are to join the working group as official representatives of their respective companies: Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook).

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

There has been no shortage of people who have knocked Facebook for their closed standards prior to today, perhaps many of whom had a legitimate point. Today Facebook has taken the first step towards open standards and data portability, and despite those previous gripes they should be congratulated for it.

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INDIATIMES NEWS NETWORK

The DataPortability Workgroup has announced that representatives from Facebook, Google and Plaxo have signed on as its members. The group, spearheaded by Chris Saad of start-up Faraday Media, is an alliance of Web thinkers devoted to “(putting) all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end data portability.”

“Their joint support of the DataPortability initiative presents a new opportunity for the next generation of software — particularly in the fields of social software, user rights and interoperability,” said the group in a statement.

DataPortability Workgroup is primarily working to create a `DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability. This means that users can access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

Last week, the debate over data portability was ignited when popular blogger Robert Scoble (a DataPortability member) was banned from Facebook for using a script from Plaxo.

Social-networking interoperability across the Web is being touted as a necessary next step in the evolving medium. Google’s much-talked about OpenSocial initiative, which will use a common markup language to make applications and widgets compatible among participating social networks, so far does not include a plan for data sharing between different services.

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